Faithin Omaha eBook Collection

Download or read book Creole America written by Sean X. Goudie and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2006-05-03 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Creole America reveals how literary culture in the New Republic period is formed not only by expansionist designs on the North American continent, but also a push for commercial empire in the hemisphere via the roots and routes of the West Indian trades. Celebrated and denigrated, West Indian immigrant Alexander Hamilton--chief architect of the United States as an "empire for commerce" as Washington's Secretary of the Treasury--came to embody the great uneasiness that many U.S. Americans expressed about the unpredictable, and potentially disastrous, effects on the nation and national character of extensive relations between the slave colonies of the West Indies and the putatively free and democratic states of the independent mainland. Sean X. Goudie examines such anxiety and ambivalence as characteristic of what he provocatively terms the New Republic's "creole complex." Goudie demonstrates how distinctions between U.S. and West Indian bodies and commodities blur amid ongoing U.S. participation in the treacherous West Indian trades. Creole America thus compels readers to come face-to-face with disturbing affiliations between U.S. and West Indian creole characters and cultures at the turn of the nineteenth century